Showcase portfolios add authenticity to assessment

Students write every day for the Penn News Network, and they know that their work is collected in an automatic portfolio at pnn.phmschools.org/author/username. But in this upcoming semester, we will be striving to build our own portfolios where we do more than collect the stories we’ve told.

blog) and a good look at Ashley’s. Lucien is a foreign exchange student writing in his blog to keep his family updated on his year in America. Ethan is a former student of mine who is now a student at Columbia College in Chicago, and he uses his blog to showcase his work as a cinematographer. Ashley, Brandon, and Tyler are current executive producers at PNN and some of our more prolific producers of content.

For a few years now, my end-of-course assessment has come in the form of a portfolio review (based on writing by Donald Graves), but it has lacked the meta-writing component. That is, it has lacked the ‘writing about my writing’ element that every engineered portfolio should have. The PNN website merely compiles, and I get students to write about it in the comments of the submission in our LMS, Canvas…pretty basic.

We began by creating a template of what a showcase portfolio should include. We based it on the guidance document, and then we looked at how to organize that information. The template should guide students in the creation of their own statement about their work. However, we did not want to create a cookie-cutter document that students merely cloned.

“Student portfolios are a collection of personal documents, which showcase an individual’s learning experiences, goals and achievements. Student portfolios are created and controlled by the student, facilitated by the instructor, and evaluated by outside entities.” -CTE Portfolio Technical Assessment – Guidance Document

Though PNN does not reside in the STEM Academy, the students who take that class produce more work for public consumption than any other class in the school, maybe in northern Indiana.

Students who are exploring this new road include Amara, Corbin, & Abbie. As you will see by a couple of dead-end links, students can keep their portfolios private until they are ready to go public with their work. Some never do, and that is okay.

The work that students do becomes the story of their career, and when they reach the next stage of their career, we are hoping to provide them with a portable look at what they can do.

In this picture to the right, Penn graduatue and former PNN producer, Lauren Nowakowski has moved on to Western Michigan University, and there, she keeps her portfolio through Linkedin.com.

Hopefully, by helping students compile and reflect on the work they do for class, we are teaching them skills that will serve them down the road.